I have started this post half a dozen times over. Why It has taken so long is beyond me. I mean literally beyond me, I have been that busy.

Fist off, what the holy fuck is wrong with you ‘Murica. What a goddamn mess. Stop it.

Ok, Now that that is out of the way…

Life has been exceptionally busy. Traumatic as well.

I’ll get the whingie trauma out of the way and then we can move on to other things…

In no particular order:

Mirror mirror collision
Brake failure
Main water line breakage
Persistent error light
Beloved dog passing

Mirror Mirror
Our roads are narrower than ‘murican driveways. It happens. Insurance does not cover it. I managed to fix mine but wow it is loud when it happens.
The mirror proper popped off and dangled from the defrost power lines. I got it into the car. The next morning I popped the mirror on, covered up the hole where a piece of body trim fell off with aluminum flashing tape, ordered a new part and installed it when it came a week later.
All good.

That sucks
Vacuum pump on my wife’s car failed. She is alive, the repair was expensive, and so it goes.
All good.

Waterboarding
In that fascist country I used to call home our water meters were on a mesh network. If one had trouble, it would cry to a neighbor (like someone ratting their neighbor out to ICE) and we would get an email like “hey comrade, you are using too much water” and we could address it.

Here we get our meter read yearly… you heard it, yearly. So when you leak 700 liters a day (700l is like 14,000 urine tests you might have to provide at your soul sucking job) and you have been doing so for (math) number of weeks, your bill adds up. And they have to trench your yard to relay a new pipe.

Here we use fucking rubber hoses (like ICE beats you with if you have brown skin) to connect the house to the curb. Our old one was laid in a bed of sharp rocks because building codes? instead of in a plastic conduit or a bed of sand, and every time you turn the water on/off it worries away a little bit at those nice sharp rocks.

Error Codes
I am too fucking upset over this one to document it accurately. Bought a used car off a lot. 1-7/8 months later (also 15/16ths of the warranty period) it gives me an error code. Take car to lot, they say to make appointment with Peugeot dealer.

Peugeot dealer glances at it dismissively, short while later, 2 error codes. Go back to Peugeot on our dime, they say, ooh, 2 error codes bad. Belt and pulley bad. Must pay 500 euro. This would have been under warranty of they did more than give the Peugeot a sidelong glance.
Belt and pulley replaced, monies exchanged, lot we got car from paid half.

2 days later…error code.

This story is evolving.
Consumer law may be on our side.

Lilou

Family pet, cancer, you know the story.
To lighten the mood… If one can… People talk about the beloved pet having crossed the rainbow bridge with their humans after waiting in a peaceful meadow.
I thought they were talking about Bifrost, the bridge between Asgard and Midgard… Turns out it is referring to a sweet poem, that sort of tries to fix Christianity’s notion of pets not having immortal souls.

Lilou, you were a good girl, and you are terribly missed.

Well, that’s the tragedy stuff. Life happens. We must move on.
It was a lot of stuff, a lot of money to lay out, in such a short period. System shock.

Busy as fuck

I took a teaching position at a satellite campus for an engineering school. My French is still crap, but these French kids need to speak English to pass their final exam and graduate. Voila. Synergy. The work is rewarding. I feel like I am giving back to my host country by passing on my wisdom.

CLUBCLUBCLUB
I have clearly taken on too much, misunderstood the ramifications of winter sunset times, and my club activities have been on hold.

I honestly don’t know where all the busy is coming from, maybe it is perceived busy due to emotional fatigue.

I really don’t like driving to my clubs in the dark in sub 0 weather.

Winter
Winter is significant.
We saw some a bunch of nights that were -10C° (I’ll let you do the math, I’m tired of converting things for you). That is appreciably cold. Like the compost heap is frozen.

Adaptation
Ok, I’ll do the math.
-10C is appreciably cold
0C is really quite cold
10C is cold
20C is room temperature
30C is warmish
40C is hot
50C is hella hot

So our extremes here are -10C at the coldest and about 40C at the hottest. Back in the San Fernando Valley we saw 0C to 50C so about the same range, but now we risk appendages falling off at night instead of our faces melting off during the day.

That’s how I live my life. none of this F=9/5C+32 crap. Who needs that. Learn life with the new numbers, don’t get stuck in the old system.

Military time is harder, since half of it is the same as 12 hour, and I deal with non 24 hour format people a lot. I can’t just say to them “telecon at 14 hundred hours, if you don’t know what that is, suck it.”

French is challenging. I am slowly learning, and things are sinking in. I don’t have a French/English conversion matrix actively running in my head. The French I have is there.

The rest

This is slowly sinking in.
We got here.
We live here.
The alternate universe feel of things is sublimating.
Steel sided buildings, funny looking cars.

My next post will likely be about how much of a dick I am with regard to expectations.